Nov 4, 1964
Paralympic champion Masham heads to Tokyo
As she set off for the Tokyo Paralympics, her husband pushing her wheelchair across the concourse at London airport, Susan Cunliffe-lister, Dowager Countess of Swinton, Baroness Masham of Ilton, might well have wondered how a disabled person would be received in other parts of the globe in the mid-1960s.
Four years earlier, in Rome for the ninth International Stoke Mandeville Games for wheelchair users – retrospectively recognised as the first Paralympic Games – she had won a gold and four silver medals in the pool, as well as bronze in table tennis. Rome, she had reflected afterwards, had been “interesting”.
“We arrived to find that the Olympic village where we were housed was built on stilts. How were they going to get 400 wheelchairs up and down? They had to bring the Italian army in.”
Her trailblazing gold medal became the centre of an Italian media storm. Out for dinner with a friend one night, she thinks it must have slipped out of the side of her wheelchair. The press, however, embroidered that story to imply that she had thrown it into the Trevi fountain, as the ultimate offering to guarantee a return to the Eternal City.
In Tokyo, there would be other cultural misunderstandings. “The Japanese people didn’t think a disabled person could be married,” she said of her husband, Lord Masham, who had stayed with her in the athletes’ apartment, “making cups of tea” for her fellow competitors.
Across three Paralympic Games – including Tel Aviv in 1968 – she would go on to win one gold and four silver medals in swimming events and two gold, two silver and one bronze in doubles and singles table tennis.
A decade earlier, she had been a keen equestrian. But competing in a point-to-point race in March 1958 she had been thrown at a fence, her horse landing on top of her. Just 22 years old, she woke up in hospital with a transverse fracture of the fifth, sixth and seventh vertebrae and was paralysed from the waist down.
After two weeks, Masham was transferred to the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital under the care of the legendary Sir Ludwig Guttmann, where she stayed for nine months, blessed, she feels, that Guttmann placed so much emphasis on sport as rehabilitation therapy and an indispensable psychological incentive for his patients to accept their changed physical circumstances did not mean the end of an active life. “I was lucky,” she said. “It helped me to recover more quickly.”
Masham’s life was to take an entirely different course. “I realised that all the things like skiing, point-to-pointing and dancing, that I would not be able to do again, would have to be replaced,” she said. “So I had to get on with living.”
Masham found the sensation of weightlessness in the pool at Stoke Mandeville a relief, and enjoyed taking up swimming. Guttmann’s emphasis on sport was to change her life trajectory.
Guttmann was one of the principal guests invited to pay tribute to Masham on a 1976 episode of This Is Your Life, when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews with his big red book. “It was very emotional,” she said as she was reunited with the staff from Stoke Mandeville.
Ennobled in 1970 as a crossbencher, she went on to forge an influential career in politics and the public sphere. “Guttmann was very pleased about that,” she later reflected. “He said to me, ‘Oh you must make them aware of other disabled people’.”
Eight weeks after taking her oath, Masham made her maiden speech during the second reading of the 1970 Chronic, Sick and Disabled Persons Act. It was the first legislation in the world to give rights to people with disabilities, and seen as a ground-breaking step towards equality.
Masham remains the longestserving woman in the Lords and is president of the Spinal Injuries Association, the charity she founded in 1974. An indefatigable campaigner on disability issues, addiction illnesses and penal reform in parliament, she is also vice-president of Riding for the Disabled – her love of horses enduring, when others may have cursed them for the injuries they caused her.
At 87, Masham continues to be a force of nature. In a 2018 interview, she confessed that she still managed to play table tennis, “[though] I have to watch my shoulders – I’ve worn them out because I played so much”.